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"Tunnel of Hope": Jews Who Tunnelled Their Way to Freedom

(Ha'aretz) Matthew Kalman - In 1942 in the town of Novogrudok near Minsk in Belarus, 500 Jewish slave laborers remained alive at the work camp in the courthouse compound out of 10,000 Jews who had lived in the town and the surrounding countryside. Thousands had been gunned down in huge burial pits at the side of the roads or in the forests. In May 1943, the Germans summoned half of the remaining Jews and machine-gunned them to death. The remaining Jews decided to escape. Using bits of metal shaped into digging tools, blankets sewn into dirt-removal bags, and wood stolen from workshops, they began digging a tunnel under the barbed wire fence that surrounded the compound into a nearby wheat field. From there, they hoped to reach a huge forest a day's walk away where the Bielski brothers commanded a Jewish partisan group. The tunnel was just 70 cm. square and 206 meters long. All 230 remaining Jews escaped and 170 survived. In a new film, "Tunnel of Hope," survivors and their families return to the town to try and find the tunnel.
2014-12-19 00:00:00
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